Sports Fantasy

While I'm blabbing about all things Olympic here, I'm going to mention Janet Evans once again, as she celebrates her thirty-third birthday today - her first as a married woman.

All right, Steve, you're asking as you read this, what's the fixation with an Olympic swimmer who retired eight years ago? Did you have a crush on her or something?

As a matter of fact, I did.

I had such a crush on Evans throughout the nineties, in fact, I had a recurring fantasy about being her boyfriend. This fantasy developed out of the recollection that my sister, who's a year older than Evans, once dreamed about becoming an Olympic swimmer but lost interest in the idea after one-five-thousandth of a second. I figured that if my sister had pursued that goal and gotten on the Olympic team, she would have been on the team around 1988 or 1992 and had Evans as a teammate - and she could have introduced me to her, meaning . . . well, you get the idea.

I was once embarrassed to admit this, but I've been told that fantasizing about dating a celebrity is perfectly normal, even for those of us who have a cynical attitude toward celebrity culture - like me. Therefore, I shouldn't be ashamed of having imagined myself as Janet Evans's boyfriend, so I'm not - not anymore, anyway. After all, the common male fantasy of dating, say, a movie star was what partly inspired the sitcom "I'm With Her," so what do I have to be embarrassed about?

On the other hand, Janet Evans got married, and "I'm With Her" was canceled after one season. :-O